For 60 years RainSoft has been treating, testing water around the world. During the last 16 years I have been the Dealer here in Ottawa, Ontario. We sell/service all RainSoft water systems: Water Softeners, Reverse Osmosis Systems, Whole House Carbon Filters, Chemical Free and Chemical Iron & Sulphur Removal Systems, Sediment Filters, UV Light Systems and MOST IMPORTANTLY PEACE OF MIND! I have an A+ rating with the BBB and have won the Consumers Choice Gold Awards for 5 years in a row. This is a family run business and we especially care about the water you and your family drink and live with. www.rainsoftofottawa.com

Aren’t you tired of Big Oil targeting populated areas with rich flora and fauna and delicate environments as the next hot place to traffic oil? I sure am. It’s almost like they’re targeting areas of the world with the most to lose from an oil spill!

Enbridge, Kinder Morgan, and CN Rail are all chomping at the bit to expand crude oil tanker traffic through B.C.’s coast en route to Asia. It would put a number of salmon rivers – as well as the thousands of people, cultures, and livelihoods that depend on B.C.’s coast – at risk for an oil spill, an event that could devastate the area.

First Nation communities are banning these projects with the Coastal First Nations and Save the Fraser declarations. Let’s unite with these strong efforts and stand up against oil tanker traffic on B.C.’s coast!

Water is our most precious resource. It nourishes us, helps grow our food, and keeps our cities and forests clean. British Columbia is endowed with some of the best water resources in the world.

So why, instead of protecting our water, are we letting companies have it for free?

Today, news broke that Nestle, one of the world’s largest food and water companies, has been bottling upwards of 265 million liters of British Columbia water EVERY YEAR…for nothing. That is a small lake each year, gone, sold for corporate profit.

This water belongs to the citizens or people of British Columbia, and is NOT meant to be exploited by a Corporation for profit. Call on the BC Environmental Ministry and Provincial Government to immediately change the law and force Nestle to pay a fair price for the water it sells every year. This can’t stand.

As of August 22, 2013 4:55 p.m. we have 5,412 signatures, help us get to 10,000.

PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION by clicking on the link below – MANY THANKS!!!

The first Canadian Earth Day was held on Thursday,September 11, 1980, and was organized by Paul D. Tinari, then a graduate student in Engineering Physics/Solar Engineering at Queen’s University. Flora MacDonald, then MP for Kingston and the Islands and Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs, officially opened Earth Day Week on September 6, 1980 with a ceremonial tree planting and encouraged MPs and MPPs across the country to declare a cross-Canada annual Earth Day. The principal activities taking place on the first Earth Day included educational lectures given by experts in various environmental fields, garbage and litter pick-up by students along city roads and highways as well as tree plantings to replace the trees killed by Dutch Elm Disease.

Earth Day Canada (EDC) is a national environmental charity founded in 1990 that provides Canadians with practical knowledge, tools, and simple easy-to-accomplish actions to support a healthier environment through EDC’s year-round and award-winning programs.

EcoKids supports teachers and students, grades K-8, with free educational resources, curriculum-linked lesson plans including ESL and FSL, and homework help and games for students. EcoMentors offers youth the training and resources they need to facilitate local environmental education workshops with their peers and other young Canadians…

Toyota Earth Day Scholarship Program recognizes tomorrow’s environmental leaders providing twenty $5 000 scholarships to graduating high school students going on to post-secondary educationin the discipline of their choice. The Hometown Heroes Award Program recognizes environmental leaders at the community level with an individual and a group award (each with a cash-prize of $10 000), and business leaders with a small business award. Earth Day Canada’s Community Environment Fund funds sustainable community projects in Ontario providing grants of up to $20 000 to schools and not-for-profit organizations.

The Diversity Engagement and Inclusion Initiative helps the environmental sector to better communicate with, engage and activate Canada’s diverse social and cultural communities. The Employee Engagement program works with employers to achieve business and sustainability goals through inclusion of best practices.

Here’s a wonderful video, ” A Photographic Tribute to The Ocean” from OneEarthOneOcean that I just came across ~ This Earth Day, One World One Ocean is giving the ocean the attention it deserves with a special video collection of ocean photographs from our online community. Here is the ocean through their eyes.

Let’s take up the challenge
to do our part as keepers of Mother Earth
– the need is great!

I decided to take the time to Google “pine beetles in Canada” and now realize just how serious a threat the pine beetle is to our environment just from reading headings such as: ‘death of a forest’; ‘the threat of mountain pine beetle‘; ‘pine beetle threatening new B.C. tree species’; ‘pine beetle contributing to forest smog’; ‘pine beetles contributing to climate change’, etc.

Pine beetle damage extends from forests to drinking water. The deep green pine trees of British Columbia’s great forests are turning a rusty red, thanks to the mountain pine beetle’s increasing resilience to warming winter temperatures. The grain-sized critter, which lives in the bark of mature trees, kills the trees within months, leaving the wood an ash grey colour once the pine needles fall out years later. The mountain pine beetle’s devastation has spread over 20 per cent of British Columbia’s total area, costing the province $884 million.By 2014, it is projected that 80 per cent of the province’s pine forests will disappear, an outcome with unprecedented economic, social, and environmental consequences.

Here is a CBC News: The National video from Nelson, British Columbia, Canada, presented by Chris Brown – uploaded on Apr 24, 2008

The mountain pine beetle’s infestation in western Canada is turning forests into a new source of greenhouse gases, according to new research published in the journal Nature

A recent study by the Colorado School of Mines shows that Colorado’s quality of local drinking water is also affected by the beetle. Driven by climate change, mountain pine beetles are infesting pine wood in Colorado and releasing more carbon into watersheds. This changes how disinfectant chemicals interact with water during treatment, and in turn creates potentially harmful by-products.

What does this mean for Canada’s west coast? “The vast majority of British Columbia’s population lives far away from the pine beetle crisis,” says Brennan Clarke, media representative at British Columbia’s Ministry of Forests, Land and Natural Resource Operations (FLNRO). It’s unlikely that pine beetles will interact with drinking water resources, but FLNRO continues studying the beetle’s impact on regional hydrology.

The damage to the ecosystem is already done with over four million devastated acres of forest in Colorado and Wyoming, where studies show changes in water chemistry and nitrate levels in watersheds, which can cause algae growth in downstream drinking water reservoirs. Risk of wildfires is another hazard to drinking water as water-resistant soils prevent water penetration.

Here is a link to an alarming award winning video I found on YouTube that points out the devastating effects this invasive insect will have on our economical and ecological future: Death Of A Forest – Pine Beetles kill millions of trees in US & Canada ~uploaded by Wild Visions, Inc . on Feb 14, 2011 http://youtu.be/KTHXPJwaLTc

Hosted by Ottawa Riverkeeper, this year’s Wild and Scenic Film Festival features award-winning environmental documentaries with a focus on freshwater.

Through stellar filmmaking, beautiful cinematography and first-rate storytelling these films inform, inspire and ignite solutions to restore the earth, build strong communities, and create a positive future for the next generation.

Award Winning Films

White Water, Black GoldFollows David Lavallee on his three year journey across western Canada in search of the truth about the impact of the world’s thirstiest oil industry. This is a journey of jarring contrasts, from the pristine mountain icefields that are the source of this industry’s water, to the Tar Sands tailings ponds. White Water, Black Gold is a sober look at the untold costs associated with this unconventional ‘oil’. Take a sneak peak!

Chasing WaterFollow the Colorado River, source to sea, with photographer Pete McBride who takes an intimate look at the watershed as he attempts to follow the irrigation water that sustains his family’s Colorado ranch, down river to the sea. Check out the trailer

There is one area of the Ecuadorian Amazon that is sopristine that the whole ecosystem has been preserved and even jaguars roam free! But the government is now threatening to go in and drill for oil.

The local indigenous people have been resisting, but they are afraid that oil companies will break up the community with bribes.When they heard that people across the world might stand with them and make a stink to save their land, they were thrilled. The president of Ecuador claims to stand for indigenous rights and the environment, but he has just come up with a new plan to bring oil speculators in to 4 million hectares of jungle.If we can say ‘wait a minute, you’re supposed to be the green president who says no one can buy Ecuador’, we could expose him for turning his back on his commitments just as he is fighting for re-election.

He doesn’t want a PR nightmare right now.If we get a million of us to help the Sani Isla Kichwa community defend their ancestral land and challenge the president openly to keep to his word, we could start a media storm that would make him reconsider the whole plan.

PLEASE sign the petition now and tell everyone (everyone!) ~ let’s help save this beautiful forest.

The following excerpts are taken from WaterCanada’s July/August issue of, “The Trickle-Down Effect” – Industry, agriculture, and government have voices about water in Alberta. But who speaks for the environment’s needs? by Susan R. Eaton

“Heralded as the economic growth engine of Canada, Alberta has recently discovered that its most strategic resource may not be subsurface oil and gas reserves. Perhaps more critical to future economic development will be the existence of abundant and predictable quantities of water. As the prairie province deals with water allocation for a burgeoning population and expanding industrial sectors – oil sands, agriculture, petrochemicals and power generation – it is feeling the impacts of climate change, including droughts, destructive floods, and reduced contributions from rapidly receding mountain glaciers that feed Alberta’s waterways and aquifers…”

Uploaded by thinkwatercanada on Dec 7, 2007 – A TV SPOT in a series for the United Nations Canada Water for Life initiative. The Bow River Basin Council and the Oldman Watershed Council are providing leadership and solutions to how water is conserved and protected. Visit thinkwater.ca for more information.

In northern Alberta, oil sands companies continue to seek increased allocations from the Athabasca River to support their rapidly expanding, water-intensive bitumen mining and upgrading operations. Current withdrawals may have already compromised the river’s healthy inflow capacity during the low-flow fall and winter months… Critics accuse the Alberta government of approving amendments to senior water licence agreements—often without public input—and of diverting unused volumes of water to third parties, for purposes other than originally intended and to the detriment of Alberta’s waterways. The Province created its Water Act in 2000, legislating, for the first time, the monetization—through the sale, transfer, or carving up of senior water rights—of Alberta’s water resources… Andy Ridge is the director of water policy for Alberta’s Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Resource Development…”

“Water mastery Ridge says, when it comes to meeting that water needs of Alberta’s diverse stakeholders, “it’s always circumstance specific.” “We apply water mastery when there’s an issue,” says Ridge. “Water mastery” is his term to describe the Province’s balancing act of meeting the water needs—current and future. “In tough times, we get involved to ensure that everyone is less harmed,” says Ridge. But tough times have existed for more than a decade in southern Alberta, where the Province has ordered junior water holders to reduce or stop water withdrawals, enabling “first in time, first in right” senior holders to maintain their draws… In 2010, the Province approved a request for an amendment of the City of Calgary’s senior license to divert treated wastewater to a new gas-fired power plant being built nearby by ENMAX Corporation. In 2007, the Province approved an amendment to the City of Edmonton’s water senior license, enabling it to sell wastewater to Petro- Canada Ltd. (now Suncor Energy Inc.) for use in heavy oil upgrading operations east of the city. In both instances, Donahue explains, the amendments of senior water licences resulted in negative benefits to Calgary’s Bow River and to Edmonton’s North Saskatchewan River, as wastewater was diverted for industrial purposes and not returned to the river systems. He adds that Petro-Canada and ENMAX avoided costly public environmental hearings and idn’t have to apply for low priority, junior water licenses. Return it to the rivers For the past decade, the City of Calgary has encouraged its residents to conserve water, even providing financial incentives to purchase low flush toilets and install water meters. However, Calgarians who believed they were contributing to improving the aquatic health and trout habitat of the Bow River— billed by Travel Alberta as the world’s premier trout fishing stream – might be surprised to learn that the water conserved had been sold for industrial users or to ther municipalities in southern Alberta… The Calgary-based Water Conservation Trust of Canada is working toward ensuring conserved water gets back to the stream…The Trust’s mandate revolves around holding water conservation licenses. However, according to Ridge, “The concept of a license that’s being held for the environment – that’s what the Water Conservation Trust of Canada is promoting – is contained in the Water Act.” To date, only the Province olds these conservation licenses in trust, but the Water Act doesn’t specifically prohibit other groups from doing so, too. Just as Alberta’s homesteaders developed the province in the early 1900s, Bell, a native Albertan, is ioneering a new vision for prosperity which includes an innovative tool to achieve the healthy aquatic ecosystems contemplated within the provincial Water Act. “We’ve spent six years breaking trail,” said Bell, “and we’re close to a breakthrough.”